Mobile Fundraising: Talk To The Hand

When someone uses the phrase Talk To the Hand, it means they don’t want to hear what you are saying. In mobile fundraising, its really all about Talk To The Hand because that’s what’s holding their smartphone, the ultimate communication tool for reaching people today.

Mobile Fundraising: Talk To The Hand

Mobile Fundraising For Nonprofits

Mobile phone fundraising is hands down one of the best ways to reach new donors. Here are 8 mobile fundraising ideas for nonprofits to vastly expand your donor base and take your fundraising to the next level.

Mobile-optimized donation pages – The fastest and cheapest idea is to setup a mobile-optimized donation page on your website. If you check your mobile fundraising statistics through Google Analytics or similar tools, you’ll notice a huge abandon rate on your donation page by mobile users.

That’s because your website wasn’t designed for viewing on a mobile phone, let alone completing the donation form.Create a page strictly for mobile users that requires entering as little information as possible, then redirect mobile users to that page with a simple JavaScript redirect.

Fundraising through texting – Text To Give campaigns can raise an impressive amount of donations in a short time. Most often these are donations that are one-time donations that are simply added to users cellphone bills.

A better idea is to use mobile fundraising service providers to handle the payments and offer people a choice of monthly giving amounts. By asking for recurring donations with automated billing, you’ve turned that simple ask into a recurring monthly revenue stream.

See the list of mobile fundraising service providers at the bottom of this page.

Text-based updates – Another good mobile fundraising idea is to give supporters the option to receive text-based updates from your nonprofit organization. Oftentimes HTML-based email is harder to read on mobile phones and overall, nonprofit email open rates aren’t anything to brag about.

Mobile-optimized website – At a minimum,. all of your online forms – volunteer signup, donations, email or newsletter signup – need to be optimized for mobile devices or they are costing you a tremendous amount of money by failing to convert a large portion of your website traffic.

The simplest way to fix this is to create a mobile only version of your website using some simple online tools. The downside of this approach is that your mobile site will be “skinny”, i.e. it will lack all your other good content. Here’s a list of companies offering mobile website tools.

The best way to do it is to hire a website design company to update your existing website so that all your content is automatically resized to be device specific.

Your own mobile app – You can create your own mobile app rather easily. If your website is built on a standard blogging platform like WordPress, there are now conversion tools that can turn your website into an app with separate versions for Android or Apple phones.

It’s a great way to get all your new content immediately into the hands of your supporters and you can even use a push notification to alert them of updates. That way, they can view new information without having to switch devices, get online, check email, hit your Twitter feed, check your Facebook page, etc. With your own mobile app, you are literally in the palm of their hand.

Mobile fundraising apps – You can also take advantage of mobile fundraising apps to raise donations for your cause. Using third-party platforms to raise funds isn’t ideal because you don’t control all the data, but its better than no mobile fundraising presence at all.

Use QR codes – Adding QR codes to all your marketing materials enables smartphone users to easily connect with your organization just by scanning your code block. Its a great way to gain access to additional supporters and future donors with minimal cost.

Mobile Giving Foundation – The Mobile Giving Foundation helps nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Canada leverage the power of mobile fundraising across all wireless carrier platforms.